Diverted To Split by Hugh McMillan
Luath Press (2024) £9.99
A Review by George Gunn
In the 34 years since Hugh McMillan published Tramontana, (Dog and Bone,1990) he has accrued an impressive body of work which marks him out as one of Scotland’s busiest and most dedicated of poets. Diverted To Split is a book of poems in six parts and if you have not come across McMillan’s poetry before then I recommend this book as a good place to start because it contains poetry of humanity, compassion and wit.
In the first part Glass and in the poem Miracle the poet suggests ‘every moment/should have its ceremony’ and this is what these spare, terse, engaged and conversational poems embrace: the business of human life, its grandeur and its trivia. Poetry is the art of observation and fulfils what Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote to a young poet: “Do not be clever, be accurate.”
Diverted To Split is a series of beautifully observed moments rooted in their actuality, enhanced by the specificity of location where the poem occurs geographically and in time and is rooted in human reality. The titles frame the action – Keats in the Maxwell Arms, Dalbeattie, Kirkcudbright Graffiti and Learning about the Religious Wars, Wigtown Book Festival 2022’(first published in Northwords Now 44) where
‘in the pub
in Newton Stewart the barman
had just bought a huge crossbow
with a metal bolt in a car boot sale
and wanted to fire it ‘to see what
happened.’
The metal bolt is eventually fired and the poet is our reporter.
‘I was in the second line when
the fusillade fired, through the target,
two walls, a cupboard and a junction
box, lodging a few feet from a woman
watching Homes Under the Hammer.
She was reported to have exclaimed
‘Hail Mary Mother of God,’ thus settling
the conflict once and for all.’
The moralitas of this tale is that the realisation of consciousness, the gathering of knowledge and putting ignorance to the sword can be dangerous.
Many of the poems flirt with this danger, toying with formal success and failure, which is naturally the process of art. But what is art if it is not people in a landscape? Without people there is no society. Without society there can be no culture and without culture there can be no art. The art of Hugh McMillan is a poetry of humanity and humility. He is one of the few poets in Scotland who writes about what he sees in front of him and refreshingly keeps his psychological idiosyncrasies out of the poems and yet as a reader you are always aware of the poet’s compassionate arm around your shoulder. This is a rare gift. ‘I have taken/this view into my heart’ he informs us in The Chair, and we believe him.
On trains, planes, ferries and trains Hugh McMillan, in Diverted To Split, embarks on his hejira through contemporary Scotland, much like Li Po/Li Bai of 8th century China – a traveller who is always sympathetic, not easily shocked, irreverent and dead-pan – always seeking something. Nothing human is beneath his concern. In the poem ‘Waiting Room’ he advises ‘Life is always beginning-/remember that/before you sleep’.
The poems veer from great beauty to instances of bizarre humour and for all the wit (which is so refreshing) there is an element of melancholy which alludes to the maxim of Patrick Kavanagh, that all tragedy is just undeveloped comedy. This transitional quality is movingly evident at the end of the poem Talking To Tony In The Stag,
‘As long as there is light,
there will be a chance
of love.’
Seamus Heaney has written that a poem has two primary areas of concern: language and story. These two examples show Hugh McMillan to be a poet with the great skill and empathy of a storyteller and a storyteller with the linguistic grace and gravity of a poet
This from Ghost Boats where the poet is ever the optimist,
‘I think of the care
we have,
and the callousness.
How the next to go
extinct must be the
killers, the money
twisters, the dictators.
Then maybe the two
sides of our nature
can reconcile,
and we can tend
as we have done
at times,
for ourselves, our own,
our surroundings.
It is a long line of hope
spun in lengthening shadow
against burning clouds.
As the last boat
leaves'
And this from Swan, where beauty is almost beyond description,
‘The plumage on the swan
is a dazzling white,
there
is no white whiter.
When it bends a wing
like a shield the sun
is in the cup of swan
like stars.
I know the swan is a bird
but it is also a tower,
a single shoe.’
Diverted To Split is the work of a poet at the height of his powers. These poems are a necessary delight in a world that is waging war upon itself and where Scotland as a nation is rocking politically like a drunken boat. In Hugh McMillan Scotland is lucky to have a poet who shows us who we are and where we are in the world. Buy this book. Because, as the poet has written, “the world is at my heels.”
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